According to Forrester Research from 2015, 88% of marketers are expecting email effectiveness to increase in the next three years. In 2016, we saw the imminent death of email marketing disappear into thin air as B2B marketers realised email marketing was more important than ever.
With only 17 months left before strict GDPR regulations come into force and strangle the life out of email, we decided to take a look at the 5 key email marketing practices to take advantage of this year.
Build your audience
No matter how good your email is, if you’re sending it to the wrong target audience, your hard work will go to waste. Profile your prospects within your CRM so you can align their needs with your email campaigns.
With the GDPR only months away from coming into force, you need to get as many people double opted-in to your marketing communications as possible. Keep your web forms on your website simple to improve opt-in rates. Then tailor your email marketing campaigns to keep prospects engaged and interested in your material. Remember, if you offer them good quality content and information, you’ll build your email audience and improve your retention rate.
Data cleansing
Data cleansing is a very tedious and time-consuming task that you should look to avoid. Gather data correctly in the first place by using field validation rules. You can also implement email marketing for data cleansing as each campaign sent presents an opportunity to clean existing data and to add to it in terms of preferences and interests. We do this ourselves by running a workflow. Data that does not engage with any email stream at any level will be removed from the system.
Surveys
Surveys are an effective tool to update existing CRM data. They are most useful when integrated with your email marketing software and CRM. This enables all survey answers and contact data fields to be written directly back to your CRM. Keep your surveys brief, avoid jargon in the questions and offer a relevant incentive to make your survey performance as effective as possible.
Campaign Planning
The frequency of your email campaigns is all about relevance. Say something when you have something to say – and when you don’t, keep quiet. Sending emails for the sake of sending emails is what will get you labelled spam. You want to constantly engage so your prospects remember you but you need to provide them with relevant, insightful information. It’s a fine balance. Use your content as the backbone of your campaign, so you always offer value when you do create an email campaign.
Improve and maintain your email reputation
If your email adheres to email marketing best practice guidelines but gets filtered out before it reaches the recipient, it might not be the content but your reputation that needs attention. You can use resources to monitor your reputation, implement strategies to maintain a good reputation as well as fix bad ones. Read our whitepaper for more information on how to avoid being labelled the dreaded S*** word.
Have you heard of any other key email marketing practices that we’ve missed off this blog? Let us know!